Peter's blog

Coccinellery is a gallery of semantic patches made to inspire users of Coccinelle. Currently the semantic patches comes from patches we have submitted to the Linux Kernel. We are working on improving Coccinellery and your suggestions and contributions are welcome. http://coccinellery.org/ "Coccinelle is a program matching and transformation engine which provides the language SmPL (Semantic Patch Language) for specifying desired matches and transformations in C code. Coccinelle was initially targeted towards performing collateral evolutions in Linux. Such evolutions comprise the changes that are needed in client code in response to evolutions in library APIs, and may include modifications such as renaming a function, adding a function argument whose value is somehow context-dependent, and reorganizing a data structure. Beyond collateral evolutions, Coccinelle is successfully used (by us and others) for finding and fixing bugs in systems code." From: http://coc

Fly by wire  is a book written by William Langewiesche that has, as a central history, the successful landing of Airbus A320 on the Hudson river on January 15 2009 . But this is only the central history of the book. The author has a very funny way of writing, and shares details about many people involved, like bird strikes specialists, air traffic controllers, Airbus engineers and test pilots. There is a very interesting analysis about impact of Airbus fly by wire system and how turbulent, and boring, can be the career of commercial pilots. If you are considering becoming a pilot, read this book first. It can direct you to the right kind of pilot, or convince you that there are better ways of living.

I'm on France and decided to give Free Mobile a try. They offer good pack of service for € 20 / month. See:  http://mobile.free.fr/ One important feature for me is having Internet at home, and the "Accès FreeWiFi illimité", or unlimited access to FreeWifi was what I was expecting to use at home. The problem is that I bought my cell phone in Brazil and it was not working with FreeWifi. This is related to how the connection works. See the links: http://code.google.com/p/seek-for-android/wiki/EapSimAka http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1639437 http://www.freenews.fr/spip.php?article12150 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmQ-TvlJlw9-dHQtQjdCUFVWSnY5T2xMeXBvRGx1Z1E But you may not need to do anything by hand on your phone. Just try FreeWifiConfig app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bubuabu.freewificonfig It will automatically configure your phone for connecting on FreeWifi_secure. BUT: 1 - Requires Free Mo

Today Amazon sent the Winter of the World by Ken Follett to my Kindle! I think I'll not sleep for some nights. :-D

Both Kingston and SanDisk 16GB pendrive has the same price range. I was curious for comparing them. The overall performance is poor, but is a bit better than Kingston DT101. Write performance: 4.2 MB/s ReWrite performance: 3.5 MB/s Read performance: 24.5 MB/s Random Seeks: 657.4 / sec Comparing to Samsung S2 Portable 500GB USB 2.0 External HD: 8.2 times slower for write 4.9 times slower for rewrite 1.8 times slower for reading 5.3 times more seeks / sec Full performance output: [root@ace ~]# bonnie++ -n 0 -u 0 -r 7000 -f -b -d /mnt Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...done...done...done... Version 1.96 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random- Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP ace.home 14G 4265 0      3

I was curious about Kingston USB flash performance. The overall performance is poor. Write performance: 3.7 MB/s ReWrite performance: 3.0 MB/s Read performance: 22.5 MB/s Random Seeks: 4.3 / sec Comparing to Samsung S2 Portable 500GB USB 2.0 External HD: 9.4 times slower for write 5.7 times slower for rewrite 2.0 times slower for reading 28.79 times less seeks / sec Full performance output: [root@ace ~]# bonnie++ -n 0 -u 0 -r 7000 -f -b -d /mnt Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...done...done...done... Version  1.96       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random- Concurrency   1     -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP ace.home        14G            3708   0  3063   0           22568   3   4.3   0 Latency                        6309ms   22399ms        

1. Convert VirtualBox VDI disk file for use with KVM $ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 diskname.vdi newdiskname.qcow2 2. Mounting raw disk images #  losetup /dev/loop0 image.img # kpartx -a /dev/loop0 # mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /mnt/image 3. Mount qcow2 disk images # modprobe nbd max_part=63 # qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 image.img # mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/image Optional: LVM Scaning for LVM on disk images: # vgscan #   vgchange -ay  VolGroupName #   mount /dev/VolGroupName/LogVolName /mnt/image Finishing: # umount /mnt/image #   vgchange -an VolGroupName #   killall qemu-nbd #   kpartx -d /dev/loop0 #   losetup -d /dev/loop0 From:  http://jaysonrowe.blogspot.com.br/2011/10/convert-virtualbox-vdi-disk-for-use.html From:  http://alexeytorkhov.blogspot.com.br/2009/09/mounting-raw-and-qcow2-vm-disk-images.html

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dan/ class/165/notes/memory.html http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral. anderson.html http://www.pixelbeat.org/ programming/profiling/ http://thread.gmane.org/gmane. comp.version-control.git/ 172286 http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~ vweaver1/ http://code.google.com/p/tcl/ wiki/DesignDocument http://hekimian-williams.com/? p=20 http://indico.cern.ch/getFile. py/access?resId=1&materialId= slides&confId=36801 http://www.booki.cc/ gsocstudentguide/open-source- culture/ http://teachingopensource.org/ index.php/Textbook_Release_0.8 http://www.ibm.com/ developerworks/br/library/l- linux-scheduler-simulator/ http://www.ibm.com/ developerworks/linux/library/ l-scheduler/ http://www2.rdrop.com/~ paulmck/RCU/whatisRCU.html

Assim que fiquei sabendo a última nota que faltava, me lembrei do Galvão bueno comemorando alucinadamente a final da copa de 1994. Finalmente me formei! Caboooo! Caboooo! Acabooo!

After fresh Fedora 17 minimal install, pressing the physical power button has no effect. This is valid for both virtual machines and physical servers. To fix it, just: # yum install acpid # reboot

I like the LauchPad kit due its price under USD 5. But I also like it due its simplicity. The Lauchpad kit includes two MSP-430 chips. It is very easy to make the second chip to work with just a few components. Schematic used for the second MSP430 This schematic is from:  http://www.msp430launchpad.com/2010/07/schematic-images-and-explanation.html I made two simple programs that communicate with each other. The source code is at: https://github.com/petersenna/msp430/blob/master/rx-device.c https://github.com/petersenna/msp430/blob/master/tx-device.c

See Harald Hoyer article:  Fedora 17 Boot Optimization (from 15 to 2.5 seconds) . One of the boot steps that consumes about 3 seconds is the decompression and running of initrd. If you do not use LVM, software RAID or partition encryption you may not need initrd. But Grub2 is configured to always use initrd for booting. If you modify by hand the file /etc/grub2.cfg, it will last until your next Kernel update. To avoid this, I made a grub configuration file that will generate entries without initrd even for new Kernels. Check it out at: https://github.com/petersenna/Fedora17-fastboot [peter@ace Fedora17-fastboot]$ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 1433ms (kernel) + 2150ms (userspace) = 3584ms 3.5 seconds is good for me and I still have a fully operational Fedora 17. :-D

O software que a SMS disponibiliza para comunicar com os nobreaks é no mínimo precário. Não é bem acabado e consome uma enormidade de recursos. É difícil de acreditar que eles distribuem um servidor de aplicação apenas para isso. Resolvi fazer o meu software para comunicar com o nobreak. Veja a saída da versão 0.1: É apenas um executável simples que não precisa de nada complexo. O código fonte está diponível para download em: https://github.com/petersenna/nobreakSMS . Também tem alguns binários em:  https://github.com/petersenna/nobreakSMS/tree/master/userland/binary *** ATUALIZAÇÃO DEZEMBRO 2017 *** Tente usar o  nut , Network UPS Tools. Os nobreaks da SMS aparecem na lista de dispositivos compatíveis . O nut está disponível na maioria das distribuições Linux.

The Grip flavor of Emdebian project allows to create thinner Debian root file systems. I've created one that includes apt, vim-tiny, net-tools, iputils-ping, and isc-dhcp-client. Later I've added grub and Kernel 2.6.32-5-686. The total size of this Emdebian is about 66MB, which is 3.5 times smaller than the usual 230 MB required for regular Debian root file system. Want to test it? I've created a 128MB bootable image file for x86 architecture. You will need at least 48MB of RAM to this image work. You can download it here . For testing use USB pen drive and a personal computer that allows booting from USB. The procedure: 1 - After downloading, uncompress using gzip: # gzip -d peters-emdebian.img.gz 2 - Copy the image do destination pen drive using dd. Be careful to use correct destination as dd will overwrite it. Replace "X" with the correct drive letter. All data on destination storage will be lost. # dd if=peters-emdebian.img of=/dev/sdX bs=8k 3 - Boot!

Virtualization is being sold as a solution for data center hardware idleness. Increasing the hardware usage level from less than 20% to more than 70% is possible with virtualization solutions. This may represent advantages like more available computing power and less servers consuming electricity, space and services. But at what cost? What is the price of virtualization solutions in terms of computing power and I/O consumption? What is the overhead of the virtualization layer?  Sample graph showing read performance for Linux Read more

Github is simple to use and powerful git repository with great web interface. If your project is open source, there is no problem if your repository is also open, right? What could be better to open source projects than having free hosting on feature rich and reliable service? But if you are not the good guy and want to have your git repositories private, looks fair to charge you little money to keep your code safe.  This looks to be the basic business model do Github and the prices are attractive. For those have never being in touch with versioning and code repositories, Github is also good place to start. The step-by-step documentation will guide you over the process of using git. It is really easy to start. Github also encourages you to make friends and to grow your social network around the code you share. I would like to be your friend on GitHub, so you are invited to see my profile: https://github.com/petersenna If you are looking for a job, Github

Steve Oualline talks about C code optimization on his book: Practical C Programming . I was curious about the real performance gains. The benchmark test results are at the end of the post. How can this C code be optimized? matrix1.c #define X_SIZE 60 #define Y_SIZE 30 int matrix[X_SIZE][Y_SIZE]; void initmatrix(void) { int x,y; for (x = 0; x < X_SIZE; ++x){ for (y = 0; y < Y_SIZE; ++y){ matrix[x][y] = -1; } } } void main() { initmatrix(); } The first suggested optimization is to use the "register" qualifier for the indexes variables x and y: matrix2.c #define X_SIZE 60 #define Y_SIZE 30 int matrix[X_SIZE][Y_SIZE]; void initmatrix(void) { register int x,y; for (x = 0; x < X_SIZE; ++x){ for (y = 0; y < Y_SIZE; ++y){ matrix[x][y] = -1; } } } void main() { initmatrix(); }  Then the optimization suggestion is to order the for loops so that the innermost for is the most complex: matrix3.c #define X

This may be useful for compiling local applications that you want to run faster. Try this on your computer: $ echo "" | gcc -march=native -v -E - 2>&1 | grep cc1 On my computer it has returned:  /usr/libexec/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.6.1/cc1 -E -quiet -v  - -march=corei7-avx -mcx16 -msahf -mno-movbe -maes -mpclmul -mpopcnt -mno-abm -mno-lwp -mno-fma -mno-fma4 -mno-xop -mno-bmi -mno-tbm -mavx -msse4.2 -msse4.1 --param l1-cache-size=32 --param l1-cache-line-size=64 --param l2-cache-size=4096 -mtune=corei7-avx This command probes the local computer for optimization flags. To use it: $ CFLAGS=" [blue string from above] " ./configure You may consider adding the "-O3" flag. The -O3 flag enables levels 1, 2 and 3 of compile time optimization. There are more information about -O3 on gcc man page. For doing it, instead of previous line, use: $ CFLAGS="-O3  [blue string from above] " ./configure From:  http://blog.mybox.ro/2011/11/02